Review by Booklist Review
Wright has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and translations, and his awards include a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award, and the Bollingen and Griffin prizes. The lyrics in his latest collection are short, fluent. The images are elegant, and the manner of address is mellow as he uses dude, man, and boy as intensifiers. The only sequence is titled Chinoiserie, though to call it a sequence suggests too strong a relationship between poems linked only by sensibility. This is not a flaw. The book has no flaws, which is to say it fulfills the criteria it sets for itself. The poems instruct us in how to read them. Wright acknowledges his debt to Chinese poetry, and in the images of mountains, sunrise and sunset, the coursing of rivers, the sounds and startling appearance of birds, lengthening shadows, the Cloud deck assembling its puzzle pieces together / One by one, change is all, change that ends in changelessness.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Musician says, beauty is the enemy of expression./ I say expression is the enemy of beauty./ God says, who gives a damn anyway"-that's how Wright tells a joke. Indeed, his latest collection (after 2013's Bollingen Prize-winning Bye-and-Bye) is a dexterous balance of lightness in dark. Split in three parts, all named for things cast off or left over-"Echoes," "End Papers," "Apocrypha"-the book is rife with nihilism, humor, and beauty: "This is as old man's poetry,/ written by someone who's spent his life/ Looking for one truth./ Sorry, pal, there isn't one./ Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives/ Are part of it./ Unless the late-evening armada of clouds/ Spanished along the horizon are part of it." To Wright, careful observation of the world and the self is the closest we can come to God: "I tried to make a small hole in my life, something to slip through/ To the other side." As for dealing with a metaphysical lack, even if "[w]e live beyond the metaphysician's fingertips," and "[t]here is no metaphor, there is no simile,/ and there is no rhetoric/ to nudge us to their caress... The trees remain the trees, God help us." Wright once again delivers the kind of poetry we cannot imagine poetry without. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Like those in Wright's 2009's Sestets, the lyrical meditations in this latest collection consider the impermanence of human existence within the relative permanence of the natural world. On the threshold of 80 ("This is an old man's poetry"), the poet faces mortality with a candid, if often deflating, awareness that eventually we find ourselves "surrounded by everything we have failed to do," our memories "merely the things we forgot to forget." A generic setting of creeks, clouds, trees, moons, and stars, Wright's strangely depopulated world takes on a haunting yet familiar presence, inspiring both Zen wisdom ("empty yourself of yourself") and dark wit ("...you've said your piece. Now rest in it."). VERDICT Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, among other honors, Wright offers up a spare, no-nonsense approach that serves his subjects well, enabling a kind of spiritual poetry for those who resist spirituality. Pointed as ever, his work continues to engage and explore life's unsolvable mysteries. [See "Ten Essential Poetry Titles for Winter 2014," Prepub Alert, 9/30/13.]-Fred -Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
